Every morning, as I woke up and walked to my home office to start writing, I checked my “To Do” list on my corkboard/whiteboard. I felt the weight of everything I needed to write. Six different papers, plus five conferences, plus writing slides for keynotes and invited talks. This was really stressful. For weeks, I wondered “should I just delete everything and rewrite my to-do list? Cancel commitments I already have? Should I just give up on a specific paper?“.

By the beginning of this past week, I had already completed my Spring-early Summer commitments (5 international conferences, 2 international invited keynotes in the US and Canada, 1 research visit to a public state university, 2 research field trips). Thus shortly before starting my summer holidays (from July 11th through the 30th), I decided to erase my whiteboard and remove all commitments and objectives. I wanted to start with a clean slate.

Obviously I don’t mean starting over by saying “I’m giving up on every single manuscript I had been working on“. Neither does this mean “I will not honor my commitments to other scholars“. What this means is that I will sit down and reflect on my commitments and rewrite my To Do list. But instead of having a permanent reminder of how much work I have to do, I plan to use my whiteboard to shape my commitments daily/weekly. I am creating a table of writing commitments alongside deadlines so that I can use that as my overall target, and then simply schedule what I need to do per day/per week.

This kind of granular planning (break down writing pieces/research projects into small components that I tackle on an every day basis) is something that I always advocate, but that I didn’t do when writing at home (I always do this at my campus office, also drawing goals and targets into my whiteboards). That’s why I felt that all these commitments were weighing on me. It wasn’t until I closed certain cycles (my travel cycle, for one!) that I felt enough stamina to rethink my full slate. So now I’m working on transforming the papers I presented at conferences into journal article manuscripts and following up on my writing commitments for the rest of the year. And writing and editing syllabi. But with a completely clean slate that I will be filling on a weekly basis.

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About Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD

I am an Assistant Professor in the Public Administration Division of the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, CIDE (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas, CIDE, AC) based out of CIDE Region Centro in Aguascalientes, Mexico. My research is interdisciplinary by nature, although I consider myself more of a political scientist and geographer, as those [...]more →